Hey Vegas, It's Been Awhile
I have found that it is hard to blog about travel when you're not traveling. Due to some family health issues, and some of my own, it had been 14 months since I had even stepped on an airplane. Things have started to settle down and I now find myself newly retired from my airline job of 31 years, leaving me some time to travel and share some of those stories on the blog. For someone who had been used to visiting Las Vegas 4-5 times a year, 14 months seemed like an eternity and I was itching to get back and catch up on some of the changes at places we frequently visit.
Getting There
I won't spend too much time in this section since my method of getting there is going to be different than any other , unless you also have the benefits that come with working for an airline. The difference for me this time was that this was my first official flight as a retiree which lowers my standby priority status and makes my planning of the flights we take that much more important. A couple of weeks before Thanksgiving my wife mentioned that she had a couple of days she could burn and knew that I had been itching to get out to Vegas. At that point I began checking flights and matching hotel offers with any days that may have open seats. We flew out from CVG the day after Thanksgiving. The reduced holiday schedule gave me fewer options and an afternoon connection through DTW was our best (only)option. We made the flight to Detroit without a sweat but the flight to Vegas from DTW was going to be tight. Already sweating out the possibility of getting bumped, we had a mechanical out of CVG which gave us only 25 miutes to connect in Detroit. A month ago my standby priority as an active employee would've put us at the top of a list of 30 or so standbys. As a retiree we found ourselves 17th and 18th on the list, this will take some getting used to. With our late arrival into DTW , we found that we had already been cleared(even had seats together!) for our Vegas flight once we arrived at the gate. This was a huge relief and was probably our biggest win on the trip. Once we landed and picked up our bags in baggage claim we headed to the parking garage ride share pick up area and ordered our Uber. We routinely use Uber or Lyft from the airport and find it about $10 cheaper to get to center strip. The only other time we used transportation was by taxi leaving our hotel. The taxi fare from hotel back to the airport is much cheaper than upon arriving, probably due to an airport pickup fee.
Our Hotel Room
It had been several months since I even visited the Total Rewards website to check on my offers or calendar rates. For the last several years we have been loyal to the Total Rewards properties mainly due to the fact that we can get comped rooms at most of their properties with our low rolling ways. I found an offer that included three free nights and a $25 gaming voucher at Ballys. I was able to add a couple of comped nights to that offer, which ultimately gave us five free nights in the newly renovated resort tower. We checked in using the Diamond/Platinum check in around 6pm on Friday night. We are fortunate to have such a nice perk but the regualr check in area didn't seem too busy either. The Resort Room is pretty similar to the rooms in the Jubilee Tower that they renovated a few years ago, just fresher. The ameneites in a Ballys room won't have the wow factor like a Cosmo or Aria room, but they are pretty spacious and are generally larger than the average hotel room.
Gaming, Dining and Other Stuff
Dining? Our dining pretty much consists of finding a sandwich in between casino stops. One of the great perks of being a Diamond member in TotalRewards. ( I achieved this as part of signing up for a http://founderscard.com/ membership)is the annual $100 Diamond Celebration Dinner. We have used this at one of the Gordon Ramsey restaurants but this year we decided to use it while watching football. Knowing that the Toby Keith restaurant in Harrah's would have all the NFL games, we decided this would be a good option to have some grub and a grab a couple of specialty drinks while pulling for the final game in my parlay bet. Unfortunately Green Bay didn't keep up their end of this deal and my parlay fell through. Our bartender, however, was impressed with our ability to order exactly $99 of our $100 credit as we completed our bill with a specialty drink to go.
There was not a whole lot to talk about on this trip when it comes to our gambling luck. Aside from one roulette spin and a couple of sports book bets, most of our gambling budget goes to video poker and various slot machines. We had managed a handful of hits between $50 and $60 our first few days , barely enough to keep the daily gambling budget alive. Our best day happened to be on our final day. We have always made an attempt to play in the daily (Mon-Fri) slot tournament at Harrah's during our trips to the desert. Maybe we don't make the effort to play in this if my wife hadn't won this twice before, but we had accrued enough points on our players card to be eligible for the "free" tournament so we decided to walk over to Harrah's and give it a shot. We played in two of the multiple sessions that they have between 11am and 2pm, each winning a session. If your score is among the top 5 at the end of all sessions, you win gaming vouchers up to $500. At the end of my winning session I was in 3rd place overall($200), but we would need to come back at 3pm once all scores had been posted. We went back to check around 4pm to find that I had held on to 5th place, which was good enough for $100 of vouchers. With no big wins to pocket during the trip, $100 was a nice boost to the final day of casino play. My wife also recieved $50 in vouchers by winning one of the random draws from the slot contest.
While most of our activity took place at the Total Rewards properties between Harrah's and Bally's, we did venture outside of that path a couple of times. On Saturday we needed a place to watch our Wildcats take on in state rival Louisville in football. We had scouted out several sportsbooks but decided on the one in Paris because we could get seats there without paying for a reserved seat. The problem there was, during the majority of the 1st quarter they had the audio from some random talk show(not sports related) that must've followed the Bama/Auburn broadcast. I heard several complaints yet it took awhile before they finally put audio on of some other game. The atmosphere wasn't the greatest and I needed to hear the game so we decided to look elsewhere at halftime. I had read somewhere that Twin Peaks was a good alternative to sportsboooks and it was only a 6 minute walk from Paris. Having never been there, I wasn't sure what to expect but it worked out pretty good. We were given a table with a tv that allowed us to choose any game and we each enjoyed the burger we ordered.
Wrapping It Up
On my previous trip to Vegas I had a hard time heading to the airport. Last fall there was a lot of stuff on my plate and there was a lot of uncertainty as to when I would be able to visit my favorite city, or anywhere, again. This time with things somewhat settled down, and at least for the meantime, some freedonm in my schedule , leaving for the airport wasn't nearly as difficult. Maybe the gambling part of the trip could've gone a little better but it was still good to get back out and visit some of favorite places and to see some familiar faces from previous trips. Our trip to the airport(40 minutes from hotel to our gate) and redeye flight home were pretty uneventful(just the way we like it). It had been 14 months prior to this visit, let's not be such strangers again Vegas. Thanks for reading.
